Free Sharpe's Regiment by Bernard Cornwell Page B

shutters. Here he had coupled with his first woman and killed his first man, and both before he was thirteen.
    He walked slowly. It was a dark place, lit intermittently by the flaring torches of the gin shops. The alleys were crowded, the people had suspicious eyes that were sunk in thin, starved, vicious faces. They wore rags. Children cried. Somewhere a woman screamed and a man bellowed at her. There was no privacy in a place such as this, a whole life was lived open to the gaze of predatory neighbours.
    ‘Sir?’ A thin hand wavered at a doorway. He shook his head at the girl, walked on, then suddenly turned back. The girl, her head wrapped in a scarf, stood above a stinking, legless man who held a knife. The man jerked his head. ‘You can go in the alley with her.’
    Sharpe stooped to the man. ‘Where do I find Maggie Joyce?’
    ‘Who are you?’
    ‘Where do I find Maggie Joyce?’ He did not raise his voice, but the crippled pimp heard the savagery, the threat, and he covered the knife blade with his left hand to show he meant no harm. ‘You know Bennet’s place?’
    ‘I know it.’
    ‘She runs it.’
    The news confirmed what Sharpe had learned from a beggar outside the Rose Tavern and, in thanks, he gave the girl a coin. She would be dead, probably, before she was eighteen.
    The place stank worse than he remembered. All the filth of these lives was poured into the streets, the dung, urine, and dead mixed with the scum in the gutters. He found, that by not even thinking about it, he could still thread the labyrinth into which criminals disappeared with such ease.
    No one dared chase a man into these alleys, not unless he had friends to help him inside. It would have taken an army to flush out these dark, chill places. Here the poor, who had nothing, were lords. This was their miserable kingdom, and their pride was in their reputation for savagery, and their protection lay in the fact that no one, unless he was a fool, would date walk these passages. Here poverty ruled, and crime was its servant, and every night there were murders, and rapes, and thefts, and maimings, and not one criminal would ever be betrayed because the strictest code of the rookery was silence.
    Men watched Sharpe pass. They eyed his boots, his sword, his sash, and the cloth of his jacket. Any one of those things could be sold for a shilling or more, and a shilling in St Giles was a treasure worth killing for. They eyed the big leather bag that he carried, a bag that, except during the skirmish at Tolosa when it had been guarded by Isabella, had not left either Sharpe or Harper’s side. The men of the rookery also saw Sharpe’s eyes, his scars, the size of him, and though some men spat close to his boots as he walked slowly through the dark, damp alleys, none raised a hand against him.
    He came to a torch that flared in an old, rusted bracket above a brief flight of steps. Women sat on the steps. They had gin bottles in one hand, babies in the other. One had lost an eye, another was bleeding from her scalp, while two clasped sucking children to their bare breasts as Sharpe climbed the stairs and pushed open a much-mended wooden door.
    The room he entered was lit by tallow candles that drooped from iron hooks in the ceiling. It was crowded with men and women, children too, all drinking the gin that was the cheapest escape from the rookery. They fell silent as he entered. Their faces were hostile.
    He pushed through them. He kept one hand firmly on his pouch in which were a few coins and his other hand gripped the neck of the stiff leather bag which was the reason for his visit to this place. He growled once, when a man refused to move, and when the customers saw that the tall, well-dressed soldier was not afraid of them, they moved reluctantly to let him pass. He went towards the back of the room, pressing through a stink equal to the stench of Carlton House, towards a table, well lit by candles, on which were ranked rows of gin bottles